WHEN IT RAINS IN THE MOUNTAINS, CARUSO

It's a funny thing in the mountains, when it rains it seems everybody and their mother heads out to the car for a drive. The roads, all the roads, even small backwoods short cuts are packed with people out driving. Should the sun suddenly come out 85% of the cars on the road would disappear. Today a desperate rain fell, saturating the landscape, the birds on the old oak trees out by the lake huddled together in clusters, the squirrels dashing and peeking out of their leafy nests. My jacket was a light blazer and I headed for the car through the drenching and found a small river separating me from my dry sanctuary of warmth. Unlike Moses I was not able to split the rapidly expanding sea before me and I was forced to wade the wretched stream and upon reaching my parked car I proceeded to remove the minnows that had taken refuge in my loafers. It is on those chilly, dreary days when the rain is determined, I like to turn on the song Caruso, because it's a song that makes me think of the rain in a romantic, poetic sense, falling through the fog into the mountains, like the rains I remember in the countryside of Tuscany. You turn up the rich tenor voice of Pavarotti or Bocelli, the thick, glassy blue and gray droplets plummeting down from the dark clouds enveloping the tops of the dark green mountains. The song is beautiful and nostalgic, cabins lit by candle light and warmed by wood stoves glow on the mountainsides like lanterns along a Venice canal at dusk.